Hi everyone, just to point out that The Grateful Dead have pulled 1000 soundboard shows from the live music archive (www.archive.org), lovingly patched, remastered, shared, built and uploaded by volunteers from all over the world, I guess because they are hoping to sell them now. In my opinion it's a real bummer to do this now after so much effort and love and time has been spent in building it, and their policy has always allowed free trading. Anyway there are articles about it at the nytimes.com and the sfgate.com. Also a discussion blog and petition:

Hi everyone, just to point out that The Grateful Dead have pulled 1000 soundboard shows from the live music archive (www.archive.org), lovingly patched, remastered, shared, built and uploaded by volunteers from all over the world, I guess because they are hoping to sell them now. In my opinion it's a real bummer to do this now after so much effort and love and time has been spent in building it, and their policy has always allowed free trading. Anyway there are articles about it at the nytimes.com and the sfgate.com. Also a discussion blog and petition:

There is an important update on this -- for now, audeince shows will still be avaialble:

We at archive.org now realize that our mistaken attempts to move quickly were based on what we thought the Grateful Dead wanted.
For this we apologize both to the Grateful Dead and their community.
There has been a great deal of reaction, our actions have caused more than necessary.

We believe these changes will be more appropriate for both the Grateful Dead and its community:

Audience recordings will be restored as they were before-- for download and streaming.

Soundboard recordings will be available streaming only.
Thank you all for helping guide this process. There may be changes in the future, but for now there is access to great concerts,
and the audience recordings may be downloaded from here freely.

I've been following the GDM saga post Jerry as well as possible, and I can say this whole thing about returning the AUDs REEKS of marketing planning. This was planned! Now many deadheads are pacified becuase they gave us back the AUDs, but please! That was their plan ALL ALONG! They took down 1000 soundboards!! Don't be fooled, this is a total Bushesque maneuver. It makes me so mad that they think we are stupid enough to fall for it.

I've been following the GDM saga post Jerry as well as possible, and I can say this whole thing about returning the AUDs REEKS of marketing planning. This was planned! Now many deadheads are pacified becuase they gave us back the AUDs, but please! That was their plan ALL ALONG! They took down 1000 soundboards!! Don't be fooled, this is a total Bushesque maneuver. It makes me so mad that they think we are stupid enough to fall for it.

Tell me, what exactly does "Bushesque" mean? Remember that this is a music forum.

Can someone point me to somewhere I can read the details of what's going on here?
(

My post above has the link to what the Arrchive decided to do.

The original issue was reported by the NY times on 11/30/05:

Deadheads Outraged Over Web Crackdown

By JEFF LEEDS
The Grateful Dead, the business, is testing the loyalty of longtime fans of the Grateful Dead, the pioneering jam band, by cracking down on an independently run Web site that made thousands of recordings of its live concerts available for free downloading.

The band recently asked the operators of the popular Live Music Archive (archive.org) to make the concert recordings - a staple of Grateful Dead fandom - available only for listening online, the band's spokesman, Dennis McNally, said yesterday. In the meantime, the files that previously had been freely downloaded were taken down from the site last week.

Dissent has been building rapidly, however, as the band's fans - known as Deadheads - have discovered the recordings are, at least for the time being, not available. Already, fans have started an online petition, at www.petitiononline.com/gdm/petition.html, threatening to boycott the band's recordings and merchandise if the decision is not reversed. In particular, fans have expressed outrage that the shift covers not only the semiofficial "soundboard" recordings made by technicians at the band's performances, but also recordings made by audience members.

To the fans, the move signals a profound philosophical shift for a band that had been famous for encouraging fans to record and trade live-concert tapes. The band even cordoned off a special area at its shows, usually near the sound board, for "tapers" - a practice now followed by many younger jam bands.

But more broadly, it suggests that a touchstone of baby-boomer counterculture - the recording made by and shared, sometimes via mail, among hard-core fans - may be subverted in a digital era when music files can be instantly transmitted worldwide.

The move comes as the group, which disbanded after the 1995 death of its leader and ringmaster, Jerry Garcia, has begun selling downloads of its live concerts through its own official Web site. The band (whose surviving members - the guitarist Bob Weir, the bassist Phil Lesh and the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann - have since played together under the more compact name the Dead) sells album-length recordings of the shows at prices that can run from about $8 to roughly $16 a copy.

Unlike the digital files sold at popular music services like Apple Computer's iTunes or Real Networks' Rhapsody, the band sells its music as files that can be copied and transferred without restriction.

The independently operated Live Music Archive evidently posed unwelcome competition.

"These folks assembled a Deadhead's dream collection and made it available," Mr. McNally said. "When we discovered it, we decided to take a wait-and-see approach. Eventually, it was the band's conclusion, after a long discussion with them, to request that they change their policies" and make the live recordings available only as streams.

The contretemps makes clear that the band's decades-long support of fan recordings and trading did not anticipate the popularity of music online.

"One-to-one community building, tape trading, is something we've always been about," Mr. McNally said. "The idea of a massive one-stop Web site that does not build community is not what we had in mind. Our conclusion has been that it doesn't represent Grateful Dead values."

Most fans, he continued, "understand they were being granted an extraordinary privilege, and they responded by taking it very seriously" by respecting the band's wishes not to sell their live recordings. "This is not the same situation," he added.

David Gans, who is the host of a syndicated radio program, "The Grateful Dead Hour," said in an interview yesterday that the battle is rooted in the band's "historically lackadaisical attitude toward their intellectual property." He added: "When they were making $50 million a year on the road, there wasn't a lot of pressure to monetize their archives." Now, however, it may be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. While the move to revise the Live Music Archive may deal a blow to what many fans considered an organized library of material, "the idea that they could stop people from trading these files is absurd," Mr. Gans said, adding: "It's no longer under anyone's control. People have gigabytes of this stuff."

For the last hour, when I try to load dead.net I only get a lightning bolt on a new orange background. I would guess that something is going on over there. Also I can't post anything at DNC. Hmmmm.....

David Gans (http://playback.trufun.com/2005/12/grateful_dead_o.html) says that the folks behind this stunning PR maneuver of taking everything off the archive and then putting the AUDs back up was not deliberate, "Trust me on this: they aren't clever enough to have planned this. Nor are they that devious."

.... I tend to disagree, I believe that Dennis McNally is both clever *and* devious. There has been an unbelievable amount of press covering this whole thing... and three weeks before Christmas. For over 24-hours the related articles were the third most-emailed at the NYtimes. These articles are just from today:

Suddenly, after all these amicable and profitable years, Dead representatives are talking about "rights" to those concert recordings. It's lawyer talk, record-business talk, and entirely valid on those terms; the Dead do hold copyrights and are entitled to authorize or withhold permission to copy their work. (So, incidentally, are those who own the copyrights to Dead concert staples like Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away." )
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The Dead had created an anarchy of trust, going not by statute but by instinct and turning fans into co-conspirators, spreading their music and buying tickets, T-shirts and official CD's to show their loyalty. The new approach, giving fans some but not all of what they had until last week, changes that relationship.

No doubt it will sell some additional concert downloads in the short run. But by imposing restrictions, it will also encourage jam-band fans - a particularly Internet-savvy demographic - to circumvent those restrictions, finding the soundboard recordings through unofficial channels. The change also downgrades fans into the customers they were all along. It removes what could crassly be called brand value from the Dead's legacy by reducing them to one more band with products to sell.

Will the logic of copyright law be more profitable, in the end, than the logic of sharing? That's the Dead's latest improvisational experiment.